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wasn’t changing fever and she was still True. Amber knew it.”
    “Amber’s their daughter,” said Callum, taking the wad of sapwool and rinsing it. “She’s family.”
    Flint looked at him. “Family can become Lost,” he said. “Family can be born Lost –” he remembered that gruesome pup’s body with three arms and two heads on the Leaving Hill “– and the fevers can change you.”
    “Amber wasn’t Lost.”
    “Did Tarn believe that? Did Jescka?”
    “What makes you think they’ve done something to her?”
    “The Tallyman. He said it was family business. Why would he say that? That choice of words means he knows something he’s not telling. Why are they dealing with the Tallyman?”
    He recalled their encounter at the foot of the Leaving Hill. The Tallyman’s appraising eyes, wandering up and down Amber’s body.
    At the time both he and Amber had thought it was lust in the old man’s eyes, but now Flint saw that it was not lust but greed. The Tallyman had been pricing her up.
    When a human baby shows signs of the taint–some used the term imbuto , others simply called them Lost–it was taken and exposed on the Leaving Hill. Until they were old enough to have demonstrated their Trueness they were not even named, not regarded as fully human, but merely pups .
    But some forms of corruption can take longer to emerge, and yet others can be acquired through the changing fevers. Those too old to expose on the Leaving Hill were banished into the wildlands between settlements or, more commonly, sold as bondsmen or even into the mutt trade. Flint knew of one family where this had happened only a year ago–they had even argued that poor, flawed Thom would have a better life as a bonded labourer. Perhaps they had even believed it to be true.
    “The Tallyman has many functions,” said Callum, uncertainly.
    But one of his most lucrative was as the town’s agent for the mutt trade.
    ~
    Oracle bulged grossly, a swollen, fleshy mass embedded in the heart of the bellycane swamp. It stood as high and half again as Flint, although who knows how far its anchoring smartfibres extended into the mud? Purple veins crept across its surface, interlocking, clumping in naevoid knots. Tumorous polyps attached by pulpy cords floated in the swamp water as if, after thousands of years, the thing had finally learnt how to multiply by division.
    Oracle would know he was coming. Its sensory fibres would feel his footfalls on the raised path it maintained to connect it to Trecosann. It would know him from the rhythm of his steps. It would taste his mood on the breeze, hear his breathing and the pulsing of his blood as he approached, even from some considerable distance.
    Already, as he came near, a bulbous sphincter had relaxed, awaiting him.
    “Flintreco Eltarn,” it sighed, as he clambered inside.
    Sweet smells: newly split fleshfruit, sliced bellycane, many that he knew well yet couldn’t quite place. Oracle was playing on his senses. Soothing him. Plying its pherotropic arts in order to ease him into lucid-trance.
    He lay back in Oracle’s warm embrace. The pain in his knee–so sharp, after walking here from the Hall!–began to subside, and breathing through his broken nose started to ease.
    “Tell me of the world,” said Oracle. “Tell me of my clan.”
    Oracle always spoke like this, as if it was somehow one of the True. Perhaps at some time in the far past there had, indeed, been something human in Oracle and its kind.
    “The world is unchanged and the clan prospers.” Reassuring platitudes. Flint closed his eyes.
    “Your injuries will heal,” Oracle told him. “Although the damage to your nose means that it will never return to its former shape.”
    “Amber’s gone. She disappeared yesterday. Missed a Changing Festival, a clan gathering. I think she’s been taken, traded.”
    “Tell me.” Soft, enveloping tones, almost too low to hear. Flint felt himself floating free, reluctantly releasing his hold on